Mastering the Art of Content Marketing: Tips for Engaging Your Design and Fine Arts Audiences

Traditional marketing approaches in the design and fine arts fields continue to recede as online marketing techniques emerge. How do you make the most of the new digital marketing landscape to connect with your clients and visitors? For design firms of every stripe — including digital, interior, product, and graphic — and fine arts museums and galleries, the solution is to use content marketing effectively.

Content marketing offers your audiences valuable and appealing information about things that matter to them. High-quality web copy, blog posts, and social media updates, as well as white papers and other types of long-form articles, enable you to connect with your audience. You can engage people while avoiding an off-putting hard sell.

Here are several tips to help you become a go-to source for essential or cutting-edge design or fine arts information:

1. Build trust

Blog posts are one of the most effective ways to engage your website visitors. These conversational posts, about 400 to 650 words in length, are a great way to offer useful information, comment on design or fine art trends, and make your visitors think about cutting-edge issues. Well-written and voice-consistent blog posts enhance your credibility, build trust and loyalty, and expand the reach of your brand or organization. For example, this design firm’s blog provides its website visitors useful insights into UX design.

2. Share your expertise

Some design and fine art topics need more expansive coverage than a blog post can provide. For these more complex topics issues, you may want to consider creating a white paper or e-book. White papers (10 to 40 pages) and e-books (6 to 12 pages) are lengthier documents that examine topic in depth. They explore complex issues and incorporate insightful data and statistics, giving your readers greater insight than a blog post.

To make the most of your white papers, don’t just give them away for nothing. Instead, offer a potential client or visitor the download in exchange for an email address. This allows you to create personalized follow-ups to further develop a relationship with this interested person.

3. Show that you’re a thought leader

Bylined article contributions are an effective way to establish your brand or organization as an industry thought leader. They showcase your intellectual wealth, and the third-party clout of media exposure boosts your credibility and industry leadership.

Approximately 800 to 1,200 words in length, bylined articles usually appear in trade publications or industry blogs. These articles are written by a specific author, usually an in-house expert. The goal of a bylined article is to inform, educate, tackle hot issues, or solve problems. Journalistic in nature, they help position your brand and employees as industry experts, while avoiding the negative responses consumers may have to advertising. Here’s an example of a bylined article from the CEO and president of a leading Silicon Valley design consulting firm.

4. Connect with your audiences

Social media is the most popular and most engaging channel in the content world. As a design or fine arts organization, it’s vital for you to consistently share professionally crafted social media updates to grab and keep the attention of your audiences.

Producing a steady stream of fresh, relevant content for your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media feeds is a challenging task. Most social media users have little tolerance for irregular updating and low-quality posts. Followers often ignore feeds that are infrequently updated or riddled with unexciting, conventional content. You have a lot of interesting design ideas or fine arts information to tell your audience about. Good social media writing can mean the difference between engaging your followers and having them skip over your updates.

It takes time and talent to produce worthwhile content marketing. Even if you have in-house experts who can create professional-grade content, writing copy may not be the best use of their time. Companies like Prose Media have the skill and industry-specific experience to enhance your content marketing efforts. We create high-quality blogs, long-form articles, and social media updates that will educate and engage design and fine art audiences, encouraging them to see your organization as a source of trusted information. To learn more, sign up for free, no-obligation access to our platform.